Multiple active adapters on vswitch plus spanning tree

[Kossuth78]

I know this is kinda a rookie question, but just making sure I am 100% correct in my understanding before I go and recommend changing something. 

In short working with two ESXi boxes (6.0) that were installed by a 3rd party.  In short the boxes have literally about 20 1000baseT NICs going to a pair of HP E3800. Some interfaces are trunked some set as a access port. Every vSwitch though has at least two physical NICs affliated with it with all set as active.  I thought you could not run multiple active NICs on a standard vSwitch unless you were running regular Etherchannel or LACP on the ports in question and a shared control plane (vss,vpc,H3C,etc) on the switches. Am I correct in my understanding on this or am I off base?

Also just to confirm, virtual switches don’t participate in STP correct?

Reason for the questions is there have been some persistent database replication issues (particularly when routed) between the virtual machines on this host and the rest of the environment. Nothing seems to be wrong on the database servers as far as settings but they just lose contact of their peer every so often for no good reason.  

[GayathriS]

If you have multiple active NICS on one standard switch  its good if we have nic teaming.

check out below article: VMware Knowledge Base

NOTE: If all NICs in a team are set as active, they are all used for virtual machine or VMkernel traffic

-->virtual switches don’t participate in STP correct?   That is correct as per my unerstanding

Please mark this as "correct" or " Helpfull" if this answers your query.

regards

Gayathri

[Kossuth78]

Not one switch but the NICs are split between two switches.

[daphnissov]

Am I correct in my understanding on this or am I off base?

No, you can have multiple vmnics (pNICs) set as active in a given vSwitch. The reason being that, for one, vSphere is incapable of forming L2 loops. Secondly, a VM can only ever select one uplink per vNIC at a time, so there's not a chance of traffic leaving from one interface inside the VM out two physical network uplinks.

That said, it sounds like this is a crazy setup and is in need of dramatic simplification. It would probably be more helpful to *see* what has been created and how to determine how to do so.